THE SILENCE OF JOHN PASSMORE Strangely for a work written by philosopher who has mastered logic and close reasoning, John Passmore's memoir gives us an account of his life and times which is at odds with the basic proposition contained in its title.
Publication of "Memoirs of a Semi-detached Australian" was long promised. We were led to expect an autobiographical account of the life and times of a distinguished philosopher who is resolutely Australian while also being strongly connected to a wider world of learning and speculation.
But the memoir before us, while providing valuable insights into Passmore's early life and career in Australia and his first pilgrimage to England, tells us hardly anything at all about a crucial institutional link that did much to ensure that he succeeded in reconciling two potentially incompatible loyalties.
For the first three and a half decades of his life John Passmore was fully absorbed in the life of his native Sydney. He progressed from Manly Public School to Sydney Boys' High School. Although no sportsman, he was not sidelined as a "swot" since Sydney Boys' High was proudly meritocratic. Education and teaching were esteemed, producing an environment in which Passmore was entirely at home.
Passmore excelled as a student of Philosophy, English and History. Along with his future wife, another bright and energetic undergraduate, he was active in the Free Thought and Literary Societies, making his debut as a writer with a still highly readable pamphlet on T S Eliot. He abandoned the Roman Catholicism of his youth and gravitated to the dominant intellectual cult at Sydney University which revolved around Professor John Anderson.
Passmore's distinguished - and totally unexpected - career as a salaried philosopher began in 1935 when Anderson asked him to teach Logic (he was younger than many of his students). After the war Passmore was entitled to a year study's leave abroad. He took the "customary pilgrimage" to England although he insisted, democratically, on living in London rather than Oxford during his overseas stint. In contrast to his confidence in mastering the intricacies of academic philosophy, he was not at all certain of his ability to cope with the chilly niceties of post-war English society. A sizeable segment of the memoir is devoted to his efforts to comprehend middle-class English mores.
Amidst the pettiness and perceived snubs merit was rewarded. As at Sydney University, brains, adaptability and hard work paid off for Passmore. His erudition, gained after years of voracious reading in remote Sydney, was a prized asset in England. From now on he could count on support from the highest academic quarters when London publishers needed to commission scholarly books on philosophy.
In his memoir Passmore is at pains to point out he was never fully seduced by the charms of the Home Counties and their aloof inhabitants. His truculent Andersonian legacy reasserted itself, producing an explicit rejection of the class system in England and the commercialism of the United States.
Expatriation (other than to New Zealand for a few years in the early 1950s) was ruled out even though the temptation to apply to work in a British university was sometimes felt. Passmore's long-term objective, triumphantly achieved as matters turned out, centred on extending his new links with the international centres of academic philosophy while continuing to live and work in his agreeably egalitarian and democratic homeland. This was what being a "semi-detached" Australian" meant.
In 1955 Passmore left New Zealand, returning to take up a position at the Institute of Advanced Studies, the research arm of the Australian National University in Canberra. But by the time we reach this point in Passmore's mental odyssey the memoir exasperatingly trails off. Passmore has very little to say about the development of his ideas and his career following his return to Sydney in 1948 after his year in England. The New Zealand years are relegated to a single paragraph while his forty years and more as a philosopher in Canberra is covered off in a single sentence (there is though a photograph featuring Gilbert Ryle in Canberra in 1956). Is it possible that absolutely no incident or event worthy of comment, whether philosophical or personal, occurred in the Institute of Advanced Studies during Passmore's long stint there?
As a result of this reticence we finish the memoir with an incomplete picture of the author's career. It would have been far harder if not impossible for Passmore to have sustained his ideal of being a semi-detached Australian if he had not been allowed to enjoy the peculiar advantages pertaining to tenure at the Institute of Advanced Studies. With no undergraduates to teach and burdened with few administrative chores, he was free to roam the world at regular intervals, maintaining his personal contacts with international philosophers. He also had the time and resources to write a succession of important books.
Passmore's memoirs have been published at a time when the decline of academic culture in Australia seems to be gathering pace, not least of all in the university where he himself worked for the majority of his career as a professional philosopher. The viability of significant areas of the Australian National University is at stake.
The forces of barbarism and ignorance can only be further emboldened if a policy of reticence and unexplained silences is followed. Passmore's failure to document eehat was in fact a long and productive connection with the Institute of Advanced Studies is, as a consequence, all the more perplexing. As an exercise in Australian intellectual history and as work of art, his memoir is strangely incomplete. As a possible contribution, albeit an indirect one, to ensuring higher quality public policy outcomes in the sphere of tertiary education and culture generally in Australia, it is, sadly, a chance gone begging.